Any new planet theories for GalCiv3 2.5?

So I played a few games and hated how things changed! Then Loved it! It makes more sense the way it is now; food stores, resource stockpiles, etc... but now the pre 2.5 planet strategy does not seem to work. I just went from easy to normal in the pre 2.5 because I just got the hang of things. I play as a benevolent earth human race so I start with earth and mars. I usually make Earth my influence homeworld and mars as my production site. As I move out mars size planets become research 8-12 production and 13 ups influence, food/wealth/population. This seemed to work fine, of course there are exceptions as I go depending on what I find for planets, and it seemed to work well enough to move on to Normal Difficulty.

This tactic doesn't seem to work anymore and I am wondering how I should approach it now; I tried a few things like my small planets as food and bigger planets as a focus but found it took too long to get a small planet going with farms. A larger planet can build farms fast but then the small planets cannot hold enough cities and upgrades to make it worth it unless you have a lot of small planets and a city takes a huge amount of time to build on a small planet.Can I get some suggestions on planet strategy? Observations and things other players have been doing?

I doubt this changed much in 2.5, but for purposes of how you specialize your planets, I don't think your planet class (large or small) matters so much as do your bonus tiles and mines. 1 research point goes to your empire, whether it comes from a large planet or small. Your ship production goes to the shipyard either way as well.

I tend to throw farms on fluff tiles--off to the side, no bonus. Population matters more in 2.5, so I would look at those growth structures. They come with +2 population adjacency bonuses, and they level up well.

I have played 3 games so far to utter destruction on easy and it seems farms do not add any additional population, only cities. Base population cap seems to adjust based on planet size, but I am not getting far before I am destroyed. I do tend to specialize a planet based on size and bonuses but it is hard to manage when you colonize a planet with a 25% bonus to all research so when you get the ideology event thing you, well I, pick, if I can, something that will go with the research bonus so lets say after colonization my planet has +25% research + +10% research from the ideology selection and all the tiles are for Tourism and Influence. Now what? lolMy plan obviously isn't working, hence playing until utter destruction; I seem to be coming up short in all aspects (pop, military, research, production... well wealth I seem to be ok not rich but always able to buy what I need when I need it.)

Cities raise the population cap, but they require food to build, so you have to build farms in order to build cities.

If I have a +25% research world I would also take the +10% research from ideology and build research improvements on the tourism tiles. Tourism is a relatively small part of your income anyway. I'd probably build an influence building on the influence tile though, especially if there are any asteroids near the planet, so that I could more quickly build asteroid mining bases to add raw production to my planet.

Cities and food are far more important in 2.5, so I try to use a larger planet for food production. Cities go wherever they can gain an adjacency bonus, or where they can give the best adjacency boni. I almost never used to put more than 1 city on a planet, now I have planets with 4 cities.

I tend to use smaller planets for production, and non-farm planets for either research or wealth, depending on my focus. Sometimes I just put a Market Center somewhere on each planet, to place-hold until I get the Financial District.

None of this is written in stone, depending on the setup, but is my general strategy.

Is food shared across your empire, or do you need each planet to have enough food for it's cities?

Have the Duterium factory and Thulium research buildings been nerfed as bad as they seem?

My early colony strategy used to be build 3 or 4 factories, maybe upgrade them as needed to build a Duterium factory in a reasonable amount of time. This gave me plenty of production for all the follow on work, and growth pretty much took care of itself for a while. But now I am confused about how to get a new colony up to a useful level of production.

I got a little further a head by mass building/buying farms on my larger planets and cities on my small ones with improvements. Also I tend to focus production on planets with lots of asteroid access and less on what is there for improvements. Now I am running out of money lol, can't seem to find a good method for income. I am thinking on easing up on the farms on large planets, building some cities (2 or 3) and dedicating a portion of my farm planets to money.

Well i would recommend trying slynn they need duranthium to build cities eitger way it is nice to get duranthium as soon as possible. If you dont have slynn, and you dont need administrators it makes sense to make your citizens scientinsts, and settle them. I like to have four factory like buildings per planet. You start out as hubs.